Any movie set in the competitive world of ballet has got to be pretty gay. Toss in a lesbian love scene and Winona Ryder and you’ve hit the crazy/wacko fish on fish mark guaranteed to raise an eyebrow or two and generate some box office buzz. Top it off with a Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role Oscar win by a pregnant Natalie Portman . . . well, while not the type of movie I’d normally want to see, my interest was piqued and I rented the psycho-drama Black Swan when it came out on DVD.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, who resurrected Mickey Rourke’s career by having the shit beat out of him in The Wrestler, shaved off Hugh Jackman’s hair in The Fountain, and chopped off Jared Leto’s arm in Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan tells the story of aspiring ballerina Nina Sayers, who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder mixed with a nasty dose of perfectionism making her the perfect target for a sleazy and controlling artistic director on the hunt for a dancer who can command both the beauty of the White Swan and ooze the sensuality of the Black Swan for the season premiere of Swan Lake. A slam dunk for the White Swan part of the role, but lacking the edge she needs for the Darth Vader half, Nina delves into her darker lesbian side through a rivalrous and twisted friendship with her competition, a journey in which the lines between reality and psychosis blur sending her speeding off like a runaway freight train into a world of madness and showing there is no shortage of obsession and brutality to be found in the world of professional dance.

And that my friends was an excellent multiple source cut and paste synopsis of a movie that had too much fish, and not enough long loving close up shots of muscular male ballet dancers with their sculptured baskets. A movie that could have been great if Aronofsky had dumped Portman and cast her co-star from Star Wars III, Hayden Christensen instead, giving the movie goers of the world a gay make out session they really want to see. The version he erroneously chose instead is gay, but the wrong kind of gay. So let’s look at the queer world of real black swans instead.

Turns out our feathered friends of the lake make Elton John and his hubby look like amateurs in the gay couple with kids arena. Almost a quarter of black swan families are made up of a dad and dad; some male swans form stable, long-lasting relationships with other dudes, occasionally raising children together. Eschewing the sperm donor route, they often mate with a female just to have a baby. And then chase her away after she drops the egg, hatching it on their own and starting their ‘I have two dads’ family. Other times gay swan couples chase straight couples from their nests, steal the chick and then raise it as if it were their own. Whether they dip into fish or not, the gay swans are frequently better-suited to parenting than their breeder counterparts; as two males, they can secure a bigger territory. Interesting that while black swans groove on the down low, their white cousins evidently hide their proclivities in the closet.

Now, I have to ask you where else on the internet can you find a academy award winning movie review mixed with homosexuality in the animal kingdom facts, a visual of Hayden Christensen in a ball hugging dance belt, and possibly gay Jared Leto as an amputee? And you thought Black Swan was twisted and confusing? Stay tuned . . .